Interview • 120 ph

Giovanna Silva, Never Walk on Crowded Streets

Rome, Italy

Please introduce yourself—what is your name, where are you from, what do you do?

My name is Giovanna Silva, I am from Milan, Italy. I should probably say that I am a photographer and a publisher, but I prefer to say that I am a storyteller, or simply a book lover.

What is your relationship with photography, and how did you get into it?

I became a photographer by chance. I studied architecture, but during my studies I applied for an internship at a photographerʼs studio (I thought this line of work would have been an easier way to travel around the world) and my life changed. I graduated, but I had already understood that photography would become my life and my passion. Traveling to other cities, walking around and taking photographs is the thing I love the most.

What do you think triggers you to photograph in a certain moment? Is it planned or solely driven by intuition?

For me it is both, a carpe diem and a thoroughly planned experience. I plan my projects very carefully, so I cannot say it is simply intuition; but after twenty years of practice and thousands of photographs there is a sort of natural instinct, you can see the image before you trigger the shutter.

I think photography—at least when you are not working inside a studio—is something so unpredictable (and so many factors are involved) that my best photographs are just lucky shots. Driven by intuition, you find yourself in the right place at the right moment with the perfect light.

What is the story you want your pictures to tell?

I am mainly interested in producing books, because I can tell a story throughout the pages. I do not think that I am a great photographer, but I feel I am a good story teller. Photographs are an excuse to explore other cities, country, lives, and putting stories together. I have published more than twenty books so far, and each story is different, but I aim at narrating cities—seen of course through my own eyes.

Which city would you like to visit the most, and why?

I would like to visit Asmara, a perfect combination of architecture and history: Eritrea was an Italian colony during Mussoliniʼs regime, and there are many buildings remaining as a memory (more or less daunting, depending on the transformations). My work is strongly related to architecture, which I use as a way to investigate the history of other countries.

What is your personal relationship to cities, and how do you perceive them as places in general?

As a photographer, I definitely prefer cities to anything else: I can explore, find stories, live experiences. Cities give me energy and feed my practice; I dig so much in their lives that when my other self needs to recharge, I definitely prefer a remote and desert island.

Regarding your project Never Walk on Crowded Streets: what was your intention, and how did you come up with the idea?

At the beginning of 2020 I won a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Rome is not my hometown, it is a city I did not know that well, and it definitely can be an overwhelming one. I hung a map on my studio wall and decided to walk every day though a part of it. At first it was ten kilometers, then fifteen and at a certain point I would walk thirty kilometers per day.

I photographed with my phone: mostly because walking such long distances carrying a camera can be heavy; but then I also realised that with the phone I was more invisible, as everyone takes pictures with it nowadays. I went back to visit the same places several times, in an obsessive way. Thus, I collected more than ten thousand images. In March 2020 Italy went for the first time in lockdown and I was forced to go back to Milan. I returned to Rome in June and began from where I left, at Corviale.

The book is a collection of those images, in diptychs; the first part was shot between January and March, the second part between June and November. In the middle there is a text by one of my favorite Italian writers, Alberto Savinio, about walking in Rome as non Romans. Also the title of the book Never Walk on Crowded Streets comes from that text, where Savinio quotes Pitagora who advised not to walk on crowded streets during a plague: I thought it was perfect for the moment we were all experiencing.

This project is very important to me, it somehow changed the way I perceive my work, which I feel is now connected to performance and obsessions. All the books I published after Rome (Milan, Genoa, Naples) have a huge debt with this experience.

Which project did you never finish?

Mmmmh. I have to admit it is really hard for me to not finish something.

What is that one thing you have never managed to photograph and is now gone for good?

I visited Syria in 2008, with an old Hasselblad. I was interested in Palmyra, but when I developed the films I discovered that a piece of the camera was broken, so all the images had a black rectangular shape on the frame. When the war started, a few years later, I promised myself to go back (I was doing a series of books on war places), but then I did not. And now Palmyra is gone for good.

If you could travel back/forth in time, what advice would you give your younger/older self?

My younger self: trust your eye, and your sensibility. I was using large format cameras but later I realised I was not interested in producing one beautiful image: as I was saying earlier, I am more interested in working on accumulation and editing. But at that time it was the camera all the architecture photographers used, and I felt I had to do the same.

My older self: take a break and rest!

What do you prefer saying: ‹to take a photograph› or to ‹make a photograph›, and why?

I prefer ‹to take›, in the sense that I am borrowing an image from the real world.

What is the most interesting experience you have had while photographing?

I do not know if it is interesting or just crazy, but I have been arrested for taking photographs (full disclosure: with a spy-pen I bought online, and only later found out were illegal in Egypt) inside the Archeological Museum in Cairo. Long story short I survived, but I decided to quit, at least for a while, with projects in the so-called war places: and this changed my work. It was a very stupid thing I have done, that fortunately turned out to be a cathartic moment.

If it wasn’t for photography, what would you be interested in doing instead?

I would like to be a writer (it is never too late!): as I mentioned, I use photographs as a storyteller. I would like to be good at using my words as well.

How would you describe one of your pictures to a blind person?

My photographs are an abstract version of reality, where cities become surfaces and shadows, where their inhabitants are not visible but their traces are still there, in the details.

What are you currently working on, and—if there is—what is your next project or journey?

I have just published a book on Naples, so I am busy with its promotion. Then I am researching for a project on modernist architecture in Mozambique, and trying to give life to the photographs I collected during my walks around NYC at different times: is there a publisher interested?

Thank you, Giovanna!

Editorial Notes

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Photography: Giovanna Silva (2020)
Location: Rome, Italy

Links: Website, Instagram

Rome, Italy

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